We will explore how interest rate levels of Mortgages, Credit Cards, Auto Loans,and Student Loans effect the

• Total Dollar Amount of Loans
• Number of Loans
• Delinquency of Loan Payments

Our initial hypothesis is that high level of interest rates will lead to

• Lower Total Dollar Amount of Loans
• Lower Number of Loans
• Higher Delinquency of Loan Payments for each of the 4 types of loans we are analyzing.

• Data Overview
  • Have quarterly data on the interest rates, debt statistics, salary, and CPI dating back to 2003.
• Data Collection
  • The data pertaining to debt was collected from the New York Fed Center for Microeconomic Data
  • Consumer Price Index (CPI) data was collected from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
  • The interest rates for Mortgages, 48 Month Auto Loans, and the Credit Card data was collected from the St. Louis Federal Reserve
  • The student loan interest rate data was collected from the FASFA website

• All tables were joined together on the Year and Quarter
• Had to adjust the Total Dollar Loan Amount to account for inflation. This was done by

Adjusted Amount = (Unadjusted Amount / CPI for Quarter) * 100

• We had monthly CPI data and took average across months to convert the CPI data to quarterly.